If there's one consistent piece of criticism that gets lobbed in Canonical's and Mark Shuttleworth's direction, it's that they do not contribute enough code - or anything else for that matter - to the Free software world. Mark Shuttleworth has apparently had enough, and has written a very, very lengthy blog post detailing how he feels about this criticism.

If Ubuntu is so bad then what distribution should noobs use? When I think of easy to use Linux distros other than Ubuntu and that aren't based on Ubuntu I think of PCLinuxOS or Linux Mint Debian Edition. However, I have no idea if they are any better when it comes to giving back to Linux community and since they are put together by a much smaller group of developers I'm not sure how I would even find out. Does anyone else know?